Читать книгу The Dodo Collection - Steve Stack - Страница 41

Roller Skates

Everyone had roller skates when I was growing up. Learning to skate was a rite of passage similar to learning to ride a bike. Kids would start early with a pair of Fisher Price plastic jobs that could be adjusted as your feet grew. You then graduated to a rickety metal pair that, likewise, could increase in size as you went up the scale of that foot measurement thing in your local shoe shop.

Such childish toys were mere piffle, however, when compared to your first pair of roller boots. Fashionable (then, at any rate), sporty boots with integrated rubber wheels and a front stopper were the skates to have.

Any summer weekend in the suburbs you would see kids star-fishing their way down the pavement as they desperately tried to stay upright, two purple patches on their knees where grazes had scabbed over.

But more serious skaters wouldn’t be seen dead on an actual pavement; oh no, they could instead be found spinning, pirouetting, and gliding backwards effortlessly in the local park, along the seaside esplanade (the wearing of a Walkman playing disco music was compulsory), or, of an evening, at the roller disco, many of which had sprung up in out-of-town shopping centres.

Then, along came rollerblades, the grey squirrel to the roller skates’ red, and almost overnight it became dreadfully uncool to be seen with four wheels, one at each corner of your foot. A strip of wheels down the middle of a sturdy plastic boot was the only acceptable formation.

The roller skate was consigned to the dustbin of time, making only occasional appearances since. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dreadful musical Starlight Express, originally conceived as a roller skate theatrical extravaganza, converted to rollerblades, and that, as they say, was that.

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